An open letter to my friends at home

            Javanese houses have, as part of their standard architecture, a small room in the front the house right after the front door. It’s usually filled with chairs and perhaps a small table, and other decorations, separated from the rest of the house by a doorway or some other marker. It’s there because in Java, it is customary to just drop by people’s houses and say hello, and when you do, people invite you in and ask you sit and offer you tea and several different types of extremely sweet and/or deep-fried snacks. And you sit in that room for as long as you like, making small conversation, drinking your tea, in my case butchering the language, and then you say, “Permisi dulu” – which literally means “excuse me once” but means in this context – “Okay, that’s enough. I’m leaving.”

            For the record, I love this part of Javanese culture. I love the idea that you just show up, and people invite you in whether they expected you or not, and chat with you as long as you like. We have a few Javanese friends now who do the same with us, though not as many as I’d like, and I’ve come to be quite fond of their appearances at our back door, where we sit them (in a very unJavanese way) at our dining table and serve them tea and whatever we have, which is not the bounty of aforementioned snacks.  I have always wished that people would stop by my house more, and I have wished for more friends who welcome me stopping by unannounced (shout out to Michael). I like it – it feels communal to me, and friendly, and focuses on hospitality. But, with one exception, we’ve never made it past that entryway.  That’s what it’s there for, and the rest of the house is private.

            The flip side of this visiting custom is that inviting people over to dinner is not at all an Indonesian custom. People find it weird and uncomfortable and will only come to your house if you are having a large party of some sort. I hadn’t expected this – certainly, I figured we’d meet lots of Indonesian people and invite them to dinner as a way of engendering a friendship, as of course we love to do in the United States. But you don’t do this, and however much I like the custom of stopping by people’s houses unannounced, I’m just too damn American to do it very often. I read too many Dear Abby columns, perhaps, though it didn’t rub off well enough with thank you notes.  And so trying to figure out a way to foster and develop friendships, well, it’s just difficult.  It’s happening, a little more all the time, but slowly.

            We’ve met wonderful people here, and been welcomed into several houses graciously and open-heartedly, and we have several people that we’ve become very fond of. But for whatever reason – my limited language skills, my cultural ignorance, my lack of persistence (I’m personalizing this, because I don’t want it to come across as a judgment about Javanese people or Indonesia – it’s not) – we haven’t made very many deep friendships. This is augmented somewhat because the community of ex-pats here are all missionary people, some of them quite nice and wonderful, but, sadly for me, not really our people. (When we visited Bandung a few weeks ago, a big city in West Java, we went to an ex-pat party there, and we realized that if we lived there [which we are glad we do not], we would have more ex-pat friends than we have here.)

            Which is to say: as great as this year continues to be, as amazing and crazy and unpredictable, I miss my friends, and I miss those places in those houses, and with those people, that I can’t get to in Indonesia – the kitchen where we polished off our friend’s expensive bourbon last year, the backyard where I play croquet and poker, the basements where I’ve watched the football games. We’ll be sad when we leave here, but we’ll have something back too, something that is missing here. So hello. I remember all of you.

On not eating dog anytime soon

      This morning, on a jalan-jalan (a perambulation) around the alleyways of Salatiga, we came across a man taking the fur off a teeth-baring charred dog corpse with a blow torch, while his counterpart butchered another dog nearby. It was a chance encounter, in an alley we hadn't walked before, my first sight of a dog butcher. There was something amazing for me about those bared teeth, so doglike and so grotesque. He was casually lifting one of the dog's legs, perhaps to get at an errant piece of fur on the underbelly.
        I can't pin down why I won't eat dog, or what it is that so repulses me from the concept. One of our friends invited me the other day to a restaurant where they serve dog, here in Salatiga. "Enak sekali," she said (very delicious), even smacking her lips at the idea. I was non-committal, imagining at the moment that perhaps I would eat dog, and I imagined that for about 48 hours, enough even to mention the idea in my last entry, until I saw the dog butcher this morning, slicing up canine cutlets and taking off fur with a blow torch. Laura says our utter distaste is because we anthropomorphize our pets in the United States, and maybe that's right, but I eat bunny sate after all, and I don't reckon I'd be as put off by grilled cat for that matter.
       Part of me thinks I should go eat dog, as part of a statement about how culturally accepting I am, about how open I am to experiencing normal things in a place I have grown to love a great deal. Why not? I eat meat anyway, and I'm not a great lover of dogs. Part of me thinks I should eat dog because to not eat dog, to feel so repelled by the idea, feels like making a culturally negative judgement about my friend, who sometimes eats dog on special occasions and wanted to share the culinary delight with the American visitors. I tried to think of something equivalent if she came to the United States ("yeah, well I bet you wouldn't eat...") but I couldn't really. Bull testicle soup is a potluck dish here, not a western restaurant novelty item.
      It triggers some reflections on those cultural Waterloos, which are not rational moments, really, but a deeper corporal sensation. I've watched my children work through these all year long, move from a kind of disdain for cultural difference, and sometimes disgust, to acceptance and sometimes even to an embrace. My reaction to a meal of dog reminds me, in sharp and vivid ways, of who I am. It's a strange experience.

A reason to consider eating dog

            Roosters, it turns out, do not crow only at the break of day. They crow pretty much whenever they feel like it, and they feel like it all the time.  Sometimes roosters appear to spontaneously erupt into crowing competitions, avian versions of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, louder and louder, crowing into the midnight darkness.

            They are part of the cacophony that is Indonesia. Salatiga is relatively quiet, but even so, sounds here are constant and varied. At night I’ll hear the wooden alert of the Pos Ronda, our neighborhood guard booth (where I do my weekly duty), pounding out some sort of code – although my neighbor said everybody has forgotten what the codes are for things like “somebody died” or “watch out for the pyroplastic cloud from the volcano” so I think they are just striking it to make noise. During the day the bread guy drives by on his motorcycle, with one song, and then the ice cream guy, he’s got another song, and they are the same bread and ice cream songs everywhere in Indonesia– four or five notes, maddeningly the beginning of a song that never even gets properly started before it repeats itself. In Bandung, or Bali, or Flores, you know it’s ice cream coming down the street. Of course the call to prayer, which is simply background music for life here; on certain holidays this is non-stop. During Ramadan, at about four every morning, a group of men with drums and whistles would come walking around the neighborhood waking everyone up so they could eat before the sun came up; they were astoundingly loud, like a drum corps in your living room, and the first time I heard them I shot out of bed in a kind of panic. In the morning our guard Jefri sweeps the driveway with a stiff straw broom – loud and meticulous, resulting in a very clean driveway. Motorcycles, bus horns, music from the three-day-long weddings that are always held in the street in front of the house, loudspeakers on trucks offering goods and services - it's a noisy place to live.

            Our neighbors, whom we love and who have been so kind to us, used to have a dog at their house (Fritsom, readers will remember) who barked a lot, but they have moved him to another house they have somewhere.  We were so happy about that, but then our guard, Pak Jefri, showed up one day with a dog. He told us it was his dog, and we thought he was just bringing it by for a visit, but the dog moved in, sleeping in a room in the utility building behind our yard, cute, sort of, but as he grew he got louder and louder and louder. Every morning, about five o’clock or so, the dog would come out and bark for a while, or whine for a while, and then the room was too small, so the dog slept outside at night, chained up somewhere, whining and barking at all hours of the night.

            I pretend to myself that I am a patient and laid-back person, but it’s an unsustainable ruse for me in the presence of a constantly barking dog.  Though I can find the Indonesian wall of sound charming and even comforting (I know I’ll wake up in Bozeman at 4:45, wondering where the call to prayer is), the dog added no ambiance to the soundtrack. As I had with Fritsom, I became increasingly irritable, and would go out to talk to Jefri in the morning, always polite (you lead everything confrontational here with a “Maaf,” which means “I’m sorry.” Even the signs say, “I’m sorry, please don’t throw your trash in the river.”), though I got increasingly more visibly angry as the days turned into weeks and then into a couple of months. I like Jefri, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble, so I put off complaining to the landlady (I have to complain through her daughter, who is my colleague and friend at the University, because our landlady doesn’t speak English, which makes it a little more awkward). Finally, though, I contacted her and asked if they could make Jefri move the dog.

            It turned out, I learned after several emails, that the dog was the landlady’s idea, there for security, because apparently the night guard and the locked gate are not secure enough.  And they were very keen on keeping the dog, which led to an empty threat of us moving out of the rumah besar that is the landmark in the neighborhood. (When we meet new people, we can just say, “We live in that really big house” and point vaguely in the direction of the house – people say “oh, ya” and smile and nod because they know the house.) And they moved the dog, and I had to go back out to Jefri, this time leading with a sincere “maaf” because I had been directing my frustration to him, thinking the dog was his. It turns out he’s just as happy as we are to see the dog go, and I assured him that we felt safe enough with just him, and the gate (and the nine to midnight volunteer guard booth down the street).  For almost a week now, no dog.

            For a while, I was becoming open to the idea of eating dog, which is served in particular places here, but now that the one I had my eye on has left, I’m not so sure anymore. 

Free-sex and vodka

            Our friend Ibu Viva, who runs a coffee plantation/tourist resort south of Salatiga, the chain-smoking-low-cut-dress-wearing-bacon-eating Muslim woman that we have become very fond of, clearly saw it as her opportunity, when we told her were Unitarian Universalists in the United States, to ask the question that had been burning in her mind for a long time:

            “What’s the difference between an atheist and a heathen?”

            In Indonesia, where your identity card includes one of the five sanctioned religions (Catholic and Protestant are separate; Jews need not apply), it’s all about the religious identity. Of course one can imagine that on an archipelago with thousands of islands and hundreds of languages, five religions doesn’t quite cut it, but that’s what they’ve got to work with.

            In Flores, our tour guide Johannes around the city of Bajawa came from what the tourist brochures for Flores call a “traditional village,” and he took us around several “traditional villages” that we trekked into through amazing jungles (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark). He told us about baptism ceremonies. Flores is primarily Catholic, because the Portuguese colonized it in the 16^th century (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark), so all the children are baptized with a Catholic baptismal ceremony, and given a Catholic name. But the first baptism ceremony is the traditional one, and it’s the one where the baby picks its own name.

            It goes something like this: the mother or father picks up the baby and carries it around and repeats names that come from the family history, working backwards from the parent to the grandparent and so on. At some point, the baby sneezes or farts or poops or waves her arms a little frantically and there it is, the name of the baby. He told us of situations where the parents got too impatient and just named the baby because the baby refused to choose a name. This was a mistake, because the baby cried and cried until they went through the process again and chose the right name.

            It’s like that here; Johannes was certainly, and deeply Catholic, but he and all his children, before they ever stepped into the church, were named this way, and the villages he took us to, all Catholic too, had pits where they buried animals in certain arrangements and aligned buildings in certain directions with religious meanings that would not pass muster in the Vatican.  Islam here, in general, is something people from the Middle East offer consider not real Islam, a silly claim about the largest Islamic country in the world. And there are syncretic blends all over the place, sacred caves and holy rocks and magical mountains that exist in perfect comfort with the religious affiliations on the official identity cards.

            Here, in ways that I have not experienced since childhood, we breathe religion. We say a prayer before every staff meeting at my Christian University, with a call to prayer from several mosques sounding in the background. People ask where you are from, and what religion you are (and how much your house costs, and whether you use family planning – boundaries are a little different here). You must have a religion, and it’s not exactly illegal to marry someone from a different religious background, but it’s not easy either, and requires the approval of people from several different religious and secular offices.

            And of course there is our kids’ school, holding the banner aloft. Today we got a survey from them asking us to rate the spiritual qualities of the school, on scales of 1-5 (i.e.” Please indicate the overall spiritual atmosphere of the Elementary school”). The potential for snarkiness is high on this survey, especially for an atheistic heathen (or is that redundant?) but I’ll pass on the survey I think.  1 is “poor/unhealthy” and 5 is “excellent/healthy” – “stifling,” unfortunately, likely is a 5. 

            When I did neighborhood guard duty last week, one of the guards started grilling me about American sexual habits. Did everybody just have sex all the time? Could married people have sex with whomever they wanted to after they were married? Were young people allowed to have sex before they were married? (It’s not illegal here, so I’m not sure the genesis of that question.) Then he went on to alcohol. Do I drink beer? Do I drink vodka? Does everybody in the United States drink vodka all the time? My answers disappointed him, but they were titillating enough for one of the other guards to cluck a little about non-Muslim ways of being in the world.

            Soon enough I will return to my free-sex, vodka-swilling heathen oasis, but in the meantime,  I send another dispatch from the believingest place on earth…

On making myself write again

I have hit something of a lull in my writing about Indonesia and our time here, at the halfway point of our year. Part of it came from the trip we took, the lengthy transport heavy crisscross of the country and the oceans that took me far from any internet and the desire to track it down in the small internet warungs ( called “warnets”) that appear all over the place here, in the smallest towns, where for about 30-60 cents an hour you can use a computer. Part of it, perhaps, is the normalcy of things now.

            We went to Semarang today, an hour bus ride from Salatiga, just for a trip. We had a delicious fish lunch in the Old City, where the Dutch influence resides in majestic and crumbling buildings and the ubiquitous canals, canals which must have been built by the Dutch purely out of nostalgia for home. Canals in tropical, very rainy, flood ridden-places are, quite simply, just a bad idea, and now the canals in Semarang, like the ones in Jakarta, are fetid and garbage strewn, very much not the sort of thing you might float down in a boat for a romantic tour of the city.  We saw a movie (“Unstoppable” – I loved it; I like movies more when I see them with my kids, but I would have liked this one anyway) and then went to Chinatown to check out the night market that is held there on weekends, and we wandered through the alleyways of Chinatown, stopping in the small Buddhist temples that appear from nowhere, festooned with red lanterns and offerings at the altars (crackers, coke, lots of incense, water, whatever people want to offer). We peered into shops, chatted with people on the street, bought stuff, ate delicious sate babi (pork sate – it was enak sekali). It didn’t feel foreign anymore, or exotic, or weird, and we didn’t feel that gut-level sense of dislocation that marked so much of our early visit. That’s what I mean by normalcy – the man fishing in the canal, the cat carrying intestines away from one of the vendors in the market, the fortune teller, the old Chinese men singing Karaoke under a tent, having to laughingly push off the becak drivers who always want to drive us everywhere, even the man we saw from the taxi, walking down the street, talking on his cell phone, and wearing exactly no clothes at all, none of it really seemed to mark the place as uncommon or unusual.  It starts to seem obvious, which is to say it becomes a little harder to write about.

            Perhaps part of it, too, is that the end point is suddenly real. We’re not planning our return home yet, or even really thinking about it, but at least for me it is a material reality in a way it wasn’t before. Laura is interested in a job in Bozeman, doing the ground work she needs to do for her applications, and my mind turns that way a little too. I am less driven about language learning than I was, even though I have so much more to learn, and I think that too has something to do with the move through the halfway mark. We live here, and now I see that we don’t live here, really, more clearly. It’s home, but not really.

            Even so, as I write this, it’s also the case that the time we’ve spent here puts us into positions to experience the place even more. I did a day long writing workshop with a group of people who work for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, protecting coral reefs and rain forests, working in partnership with local people and NGOs and the Indonesian government, trying to negotiate the complicated demands of such disparate audiences in all sorts of different texts. I was proud to help out an organization I admire deeply for its work in the United States, in doing desperately needed work in another country I have come to love as well. I attended a conference in Semarang where I met other people from all over Indonesia (and came to resent even further the intellectual colonization of Power Point). I can speak, which is glorious thing – not fluently, not about deep things, but I can talk to the taxi drivers and the people next to me on the bus and the guy at the banana crepe stand, and it’s like a key turning.  In small ways, the country is opening up to us – I say small, because the openings reveal mostly what we will never know about the place and people. Still, even that is progress.

            So I am writing this, and posting it, a blog mostly about nothing at all, because I have found the blog to be an amazing resource for clarity about the experience. Here are just a few of the things that I won’t have time to write about because I stopped writing for so long, but wish I would have explored more fully:

·      The illegal gold-mining and processing in the Southwest corner of Lombok where we spent several days, giant hand made rock-tumblers spinning everywhere all the time processing the gleanings from mines unsparingly exploited;

·      My first temper-tantrum all in Indonesian;

·      Being on the ocean for five days, where I determined finally that my next career with not be as a mariner;

·      Swilling arak (palm liquor, potent and delicious) during a ceremony in a “traditional” village in Flores, surrounded by children (one of them Graham) shooting off bamboo cannons, and dancers, who were simultaneously singing the 700 year history of their village;

·      Listening to the Belgian tourists on the boat describe how much better the “traditional” villages were in Sulawesi than in Flores;

·      The tirade given by the Hungarian man when we failed to see any Komodo dragons in the wild on Komodo Island (“Ve haf been traveling for three days to see the dragons”). We only saw the ones by the trash heap near the kitchen, bloated and immobile. (“Can you hit it with a stick to make it get and walk?”) He promised he would write a letter to the United Nations, complaining about their lousy World Heritage Site.

·      Our amazing tour guide in Flores, and our great driver there, and the five men who sang beautifully 60s rock anthems on the steps of our restaurant in Bajawa;

·      The keynote speaker at the conference from Bowling Green State University, an expert on jazz, who said he would improvise his paper in the spirit of jazz, and said nothing of interest for ½ hour, and annoyed me tremendously by his clumsy cover of laziness pretending to be creativity;

·      The tendency of Indonesian conference presenters to run out of time to discuss the topic of their paper because they are so comprehensive about the theoretical background and the methodology (all excruciatingly detailed on Power Point);

·      The incredible student performance, and the faculty follies (which I played in as well) that demonstrated a kind of department spirit and camaraderie that I envy, and that seems impossible to imagine among American students and faculty;

It’s like that, a list that reminds me why I need to write the blog, because it always helps me notice what I forget to notice, what passes me by like it’s just obvious. I so easily get tricked into seeing things as normal.

Image to save for a future metaphor

       In a bungalow on a beautiful and quiet beach on the south coast of Flores, Laura and I watched from our bed as a spider wove a web inside the top of our closed mosquito netting.

We're back

            Lost a little blog momentum in the three week hiatus through a big chunk of eastern Indonesia, a bus, boat, car, plane, train extravaganza that was marked by moving. We started on a 24 hour bus ride from Salatiga to Lombok, which required a 12 hour drive on an express bus from Solo to the tip of east Java, a 45 minute ferry ride to Bali, a five hour bus ride across Bali, a five hour ferry ride, and then we had an hour taxi to our hotel in Lombok, where we arrived on Christmas Eve exhausted and overwhelmed. The most extraordinary part of this leg was the bus ride in Java, on a bus which a woman I met later compared to the busses in Harry Potter, that suddenly get skinny and survive the passing. We were in the front seats of a bus ride that started at 8 PM; I thought the front seat would be the best seat, with the best view, but it was really the best view of our impending death. Everything comes back to an island 1/3 the size of Montana with 130 million people – on mostly two lane highways, with bus drivers who are in a hurry.  Motorcycles were seemingly invisible to the drivers, forced off the road (they seem quite resigned to this) on multiple occasions. I could not sleep for most of the night for multiple reasons:

1. I could not close my eyes to the driving, which caused enormous amounts of adrenaline to course through my body. I was almost killed that night by several trucks, cars, busses and various other hazards of the road, headlights flashing frantically at our driver just before the bus got skinny again and suddenly appeared back on the right side (the left side here) of the road.
2. “No smoking” in Indonesia can be interpreted in multiple ways. Most typically, it means, “no smoking unless you really want a cigarette in which case nobody is going to stop you.” On the bus, “No smoking” meant “No smoking unless you are one of the two drivers or the guy on board to help them,” all of them sitting in the front, puffing furiously. Of course I believed that their nicotine could be the difference between survival and death, so we said nothing.
3. Graham.
4. Graham.
5. Graham, who after about three hours in any moving vehicle suddenly turns into a kind of gremlin. He becomes frantic, panicked about not being able to sleep, uncomfortable, and resentful of any forces that have conspired to put him in this situation (obviously only in order to torment him), those forces being me, Laura, and Seamus, depending on who is in closer proximity. At about two in the morning, speeding somewhere through East Java, I very nearly just told the bus driver to let Graham and me out, and that we would figure things out from there.
6. The seats, which were somewhat spacious, sort of, but also broken.
7. Gnawing hunger. About 10 o’clock in the night, and about 10 o’clock the next morning, we stopped for the most god-awful food I have eaten since we landed in Indonesia. Perhaps like the busses the food was sort of magic, food that stops your hunger without your even having to eat it. We had plates full of stuff that we couldn’t identify, and we sort of just stared at them, a little depressed, already exhausted.

We arrived safely, however, and spent a marvelous Christmas on a beach in Lombok, rifling through stockings that Santa somehow got to us, eating fresh seafood, snorkeling, sleeping, on a nearly unvisited part of the island. It was so quiet, and so relaxing, and so perfect, after the semester we had, that it wiped out the memory of the bus trip (which we avoided for the way home by booking a flight).

            I just wanted to announce our safe return, and wish a Happy New Year to any readers who are still with the blog. And if my Grote friends read this, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I can’t believe you picked the first Grote ski trip for the year I will not see snow.